A Heady Vote in Pakistan

I traveled through Pakistan for two weeks in late February and early March—a time of particular violence in a country that has suffered much of it in the recent past, in which a common thread in conversations was fear about the forthcoming national vote. “It is going to be a violent election,” a magazine editor told me. And many others echoed him, citing Taliban threats to attack a process they deemed un-Islamic and political parties using violence as a campaign tactic, especially in the edgy city of Karachi, with its ethnically and politically fractured populace.

Then, on Saturday, May 11th, Pakistan came out to vote. It was the first time in the country’s turbulent history that a civilian government completed a five-year term in power without being overthrown in a military coup or deposed by a President working in tandem with the military. The past five years have seen a democratically run government, but have also been an era of inflation, low economic growth and intense violence, building up a sense of frustration and certain desperation to change things for better.

In some places, the fears were realized. By the evening, twenty-two people were killed in attacks on voters across the country. In the frontline city of Peshawar, a motorcycle bomb, planted near a polling booth set aside for women, injured eight. In the final two weeks of campaigning, around a hundred and thirty people were killed in terror attacks. Six hundred thousand security and police personnel were deployed to safeguard the voters and the polling booths.

Yet on Saturday, Pakistan was overwhelmed by an enthusiastic outpouring of voters across classes and ethnicities. Some waited for hours to get into the polling booths. Some walked miles, in temperatures ranging from a hundred to a hundred and ten degrees Farenheit. Some had flown from U.A.E., Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, and the United States, taking time off from their jobs, to be able to cast their votes and make a statement in favour of sustained civilian rule, in hope of a better Pakistan.

One of the Pakistanis who partly lives abroad is the London-based novelist, Kamila Shamsie, the author, most recently, of “Burnt Shadows.” Shamsie had returned to her city, Karachi, before the elections. As she left home to vote, she began to tweet #pollingboothtales describing the atmosphere. Shamsie was moved by a mass turnout of women voters: “They came in niqab, they came in hijab, they came in combat trousers and even a kaftan,” she tweeted.

Shamsie had never seen voters in Pakistan so intent on making it to the polling booths and casting their ballots. “I went to vote in the morning, stood around two hours with very good-natured, chatty women all around me. Then it turned out that the ballot papers were invalid because they didn’t have the necessary official stamp,” Shamsie told me. She went home and returned after an hour. “An hour or so later the stamps arrived at the polling booth and I went back, queued for another two hours. People were wilting, but still determined. And I finally cast my vote. I am very moved by the Pakistan populace’s faith in this battered process, and I’d like to see that honored by the government (probably a coalition) which comes in,” she continued.

The democratic spirit has already been dampened by the Pakistani authorities as they moved to deport Declan Walsh, the Times bureau chief in the country. Walsh, who has been reporting for nine years—as the Guardian correspondent before joining the Times last year—is one of the most respected and loved reporters working in Pakistan. On Thursday, Pakistan’s Interior Ministry ordered Walsh to leave the country within seventy-two hours in view of supposed “undesirable activities.” Last night he was picked up by the Pakistani authorities from a friend’s house and kept in isolation in a hotel surrounded by security guards and is expected to be sent out of the country today. Walsh managed to send out a last tweet, “72 hours, wheels up. To all friends, especially in Pakistan, who offered overwhelming support in recent days, thank you so much.” With his expulsion, Pakistan has lost some of its sheen and a very good reporter.

According to the Election Commission of Pakistan, the governmental body running and monitoring the polls, eighty-four million out of the country of a hundred and eighty million were registered as voters, including thirty-six million women. Electoral contests in Pakistan have traditionally been between the two dominant political parties: the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, founded by late Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and led by his son-in-law and President of Pakistan Asif Ali Zardari; and Pakistan Muslim League, led by an industrialist-turned-politician and former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif. The challenger who upset the two-party balance and electrified the campaign is Imran Khan, a former cricket superstar and chief of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (Pakistan Movement for Justice) Party.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who deployed fiery socialist rhetoric in his political campaigns, was hanged to death in 1979 by his army chief General Zia ul Haq, an event that ushered Zia’s dictatorship. Bhutto’s daughter and late Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto led the People’s Party to power after Zia’s 1987 death in a plane crash, and riding on the sympathy vote, her uncharismatic widower, Asif Ali Zardari, has been leading the People’s Party and the Pakistan government for the past five years. Zardari is seen as corrupt and inefficient. “Nobody expects the People’s Party to return to power,” Osama Siddique, a Professor of Law at Lahore University of Management Sciences, told me.

Instead, Nawaz Sharif has emerged the frontrunner. Sharif’s party mixes Islam with big business, with supporters among the religious and trading classes and a fondness for infrastructure projects. (In The Caravan magazine, Mira Sethi recently recounted how “Sharif told the crowd he would build a bullet train from Karachi to Peshawar; the train would leave Karachi after fajr prayer, at dawn, and arrive in Peshawer just in time for the evening isha prayer.”) Sharif’s party has its core base in the country’s most populous province, Punjab, where his brother Shahbaz Sharif headed the provincial government for the past years. In Lahore, I saw the Sharif brothers on posters highlighting their contributions to the mass transit Metro Bus system.

A peaceful transition “was my desire and it is my dream which I see today being fulfilled,” Sharif told the press Saturday afternoon after casting his vote in Lahore. He wore a traditional Salwar Kameez and had pinned a badge embossed with a Tiger—his election symbol onto his waistcoat.

Sharif will have to prove himself as a leader of all of Pakistan and not be Punjab-centric. His social conservatism and proximity with the Saudi state will also raise questions about how Pakistan’s persecuted and marginalized Hindu and Christian minorities will fare under the new government. Although the majority of Pakistan’s Christians live in Sharif’s Punjab and, during the campaign, he has promised them equal rights, his party has not nominated a single Christian person to contest elections on its party ticket.

By Saturday morning, Sharif was leading in more than a hundred of Pakistan’s three hundred constituencies. Imran Khan has emerged as a serious politician, his party leading in thirty-five seats nationally. Khan, who has been vigorously campaigning against the establishment and raging against the United States’s drone attacks, is most likely to be the runner-up and leader of the opposition in parliament; his party is set to form the state government in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or North Western Frontier Province, where it defeated the secular, left-leaning Awami National Party, which was targeted by the Taliban.

Pakistan’s liberals often taunt Khan as “The Taliban Khan” or “Im the Dim,” the derisive moniker that the British tabloids used during his cricketing days. “He often declares that if he was in charge he would withdraw the military from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, a lightly governed territory along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan where the Taliban have found refuge, and engage in negotiations that would end terrorism in Pakistan in ninety days,” Steve Coll wrote in his profile of Khan in The New Yorker. “The so-called ‘liberals’ treat the Taliban as if there were only one way to deal with them—through the military,” Khan told Coll.

But Khan attracted great support among the urban middle class, especially the young, and his image as a great sportsman, his position as a political outsider drew thousands to him. In the past few years, crowds at his rallies grew immensely, an upsurge he unfortunately described as a Tsunami. In an early May campaign speech, he told a rally that he did not seek votes from the Ahmadi sect, a persecuted minority group, which identifies itself as Muslim but is deemed non-Muslim by the Sunni majority and the Pakistan government. Manan Ahmed Asif, an assistant professor at Columbia University, argued in the Times that in doing so Khan “legitimized intolerance in the eyes of his millions of idealistic young followers, who quickly echoed his dismissal in online networks.”

Last week, while Khan was campaigning in Lahore, he slipped off a platform attached to a forklift truck used to carry him onstage after one of his guards lost balance. Khan was hospitalized with a skull fracture and back injury. In true melodramatic fashion, the injured sportsman turned politician released a campaign video from his hospital lying on a bed in blue overalls. His commanding voice seemed weak, beseeching as he spoke. “I did what I could. If you have to change your destiny, you have to take responsibility.…Remember: 11th of May. You have to vote to change your destiny. Vote for Tehreek-e-Insaaf.”

According to the Election Commission of Pakistan, the polling day had seen a turnout of sixty per cent of the voters. The conduct of the elections appears largely free and fair except for reports of violence and rigging in Karachi. And voters were quick to post images of electoral malpractices through phone videos and pictures on Twitter and Facebook, forcing the election commission to act against the parties involved. The final results will be declared late Sunday.